On (Mis-) Translating Paul Celan
Shira Wolosky
Paul Celan's poetry is extreme and exceptional in its
difficulty; but also typical and paradigmatic.
only apparently paradoxical.
This duality is
Approaching any text requires and
presumes interpretive stances and practices.
With Celan, these
are necessary to the extent that without such interpretive
perspectives, even construing him becomes impossible.
In this
sense, translating Celan is a further and more radical, but still
comparable effort simply to reading him
-- where translation,
however, itself becomes the model for reading.i
In almost any
poetry, each individual word or word- part takes on full
significance only in relation to the inter-connections between
words within the whole enterprise of the text and work.
But
Celan's work carries this to an extreme, such that without
reference to the assumptions, interests, contexts, and figures
that the ongoing work is articulating and bringing into view, his
texts, and often even his words, remain inaccessible and
incomprehensible.
Understanding him at all thus requires acts of
reference, collation, and reconstruction such as characterizes
translation as well.
In "The Task of the Translator," Walter Benjamin emphasizes
that the relation between translation and text is not one of
substitution or duplication: "No translation would be possible if
in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original"
(73).ii
Benjamin rather speaks of the relationship in terms of
an "echo," "harmony," "supplement: "The task of the translator
consists in finding that intended effect upon the language into
which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the
original" (76).
"It gives voice to the intentio of the original
not as reproduction, but as harmony, as a supplement to the
language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of
intentio" (79).
Walter Benjamin's task of translation is
especially apt and arduous for Celan, and applies not only to the
attempt to transpose from language to language but from text to
reading.
With Celan, and again to both an extreme and
paradigmatic degree, translation -- and reading -- remain
provisional and disjunctive experiences.
And, as Benjamin urges,
the translation must show this, and also its own, strain.
The
translation must not attempt to replace nor reproduce the
original.
miss.
In Celan, especially, the translation must necessarily
It must not strive to absorb Celan into the target
language as though native to it.
For, first, this would do
violence to the strangeness and disruption of Celanian texts.
To
heal the linguistic wounds or seal the linguistic gaps by making
the text an articulate and normative discourse in another
language would be to betray Celan's project on many levels.
Celan's strangeness must itself be translated.
This translated
strangeness then serves a second function, to dramatize the
distance, as also the relation, between the translation and the
Wolosky 3
original text.
translation.
The translation must dramatize its own status as
In refusing a normative, secure language, in
indicating open options or incomplete choices (if necessary, with
commentary adjoined to the text), the translation insists on its
otherness from the original. Its own disjunctive, strained words
and forms must in their incompleteness or inacessibility
constantly point back to the original text, insisting on its
difference by making its own effort visible.
Translation in this disjunctive sense is consistent with
Celan's own modes of textuality: his own commitments to language
and its historicity, and his relation to German itself.
Indeed,
the challenge of translating Celan extends not only to the target
language but also to the source language.
Celan's writing is in
many senses based, rather than written in German.
is refracted, de- and then recomposed.
are distorted.
His language
Grammar and lexical forms
Words are fragmented, or reformed as neologism.
Reading Celan in German already requires reconstruction,
archeology, etymology, and invention.
His very relation to
German language, literature, and tradition is thus radicalized
and made problematic in his German language textures.iii
One
might say Celan's own written German is a kind of translation
from German's linguistic norms, and that reading even the German
text requires a task of translation.
Translation emerges as an
extension and radicalization of conditions inherent in his act of
writing, as also in the act of reading him.
The refusal to
Wolosky 4
naturalize Celan into another language is thus necessary because
nativity is itself alien to Celan.
His work never resides fully
or comfortably in any native tongue.
In undertaking its tasks of self-dramatized and disjunctive
transfiguration ("transformation and renewal," Benjamin says,
73), the art of translation centers in, and also underscores, the
language- matrix that situates words in a Celan text.
That is,
any translated word or word fragment must be chosen and placed in
terms of that multiplicity of relationships to other words, both
within Celan's text and also, in an almost haunting slippage,
beyond it into usages, contexts, and events, without which even
the basic senses of the words remain inaccessible.
It is the
matrix and shape of the text as a language-field which must be
emphasized in both reading and translating: the language-grid
into which his words find place.
It is as this field that
Benjamin's "intentio" finds expression.
Selecting words in one
language as figures for words in another must engage and render
the overarching language-structures into which Celan's texts
configure.
This centrality of the extensive language-field as situating
each word, which the translation must work within and make
visible, has central implications for the interpretation of
Celan's texts, especially in their relationships to history.
Celan studies tend to bifurcate either into historical
discussions, centering in the Holocaust; or, into questions of
Wolosky 5
theory, such that his texts are seen as autonomous, selfreferential language structures, withdrawn from relation to any
world outside it.iv
just such divisions.
Celan's work, however, directly contests
Rather than addressing any one of these
concerns, each Celan text emerges as a field of forces, in which
questions of history, of language, and of the sacral as well,
intersect, or collide, so as mutually to conform, or inform, or
deform each other.
The problem of translation is then the
problem of translating this field, with its forces, onto the
terrain of a different language.
It is a problem, not least, of
translating the disruption, the rupture and violence of the
texts: and also the strange mutations and mutual transformations
within them.
It is a problem of respecting the fabric of the
text, the interweaving of the various historical, linguistic, and
sacral forces brought together within its field.
In translating, this effort of course foremostly becomes a
question of word choice: that is, choices involving parts of
words, word-extensions, arcane wordplay and neologisms, as much
as more normative usages.
No less pressingly, there is the
problem of sequence, of progression and regression and
digression; of rhythm and repetition, as these are enacted across
an often bizarre syntax and severe art of lineation.
texts are in fact highly constructed.
Celan's
They make a strong
impression as entropic -- as being thrown together in accidental
and random word-junctures.
But this entropy stands in high
Wolosky 6
tension with a structure that is overwrought and overdetermined
in every sense.
To give some sense of this, and of the
challenges to the translator (challenges which the translator
must represent rather than overcome) I would like to propose a
poem from Fadensonnen, entitled "Deine Augen im Arm:"
Deine Augen im Arm,
Die
Auseinandergebrannten,
Dich weiterwiegen, im fliegenden Herzschatten, dich.
Wo?
Mach den Ort aus, machs Wort aus.
Lo
"sch. Miss.
Aschen-Helle, Aschen-Elle -- geschluckt.
Vermessen, entmessen, verortet, entwortet,
entwo
Aschen-Schluckauf, deine Augen
im Arm,
immer.
Translation:
Your eyes in the arm,
the
burnt-apart.
they cradle you further, in the flying
heartshadow, you.
Where?
Make out the world, make out the word.
Go out. --less.
Ash-bright, ash-right, -- swallowed.
Measured, dismeasured, displaced, deworded-dewo
Wolosky 7
Ash-swallowed-up, your eyes
in the arm,
ever.v
This poem has been described as an "eigenwilligen
Sprachspiele," a willful language game.vi
But linguistic issues
here are obviously situated in historical ones.
The "eyes in the
arm" suggest the eyes of time, frozen into space (as at the
poem's conclusion), familiar from many other Celan texts ("Auge
der Zeit," the eye of time, he calls them in one early poem).vii
The eyes are part of, and apart from, a disintegrated self, whose
heart and mouth are also suggested here; distributed across
disconnected moments and uttered through a disconnected language.
And the poem leaves no doubt as to the source of disruption,
with its image of "die auseinandergebrannten," the burnt-apart,
and of ashes.
history.
This self is itself burnt-apart, in the ordeal of
Its ashes are near to being extinguished. Its entire
placement is uncertainly projected in the syntactically
disconnected question-line: "Wo?" which underscores both how
determining, and how disturbed, the question of direction -linguistic and historical -- remains.
In terms of translation, the challenge and fascination of
the text involves specific language-imagery as well as, indeed in
relation to, its linguistic patterns.
Within this dispersed
field of text and self, language is invoked as the grid which
would, or should, bring some sort of coherence, if not cohesion,
not least to the self.
"Mach den Ort aus, machs Wort aus"
Wolosky 8
challenges the translator to transpose in English the crucial
feature of the progression from "Ort" to "Wort."
The German
makes the difference between placement in space and placement in
language turn on a single letter.
This language-event suggests
the radical association between language and the very acts of
constructing one's world so fundamental, to Celan's whole poetic.
What is dramatized is how orientation, placing oneself, is at
once a spatial and a linguistic act: such that each is both a
figure for, and fundamentally implicated in, the other.
Another
translation choice might have been site/cite, but this would have
carried the translation too far away from the original.
World/Word retains the relationship and the erasure in Ort/Wort,
although "world" gives a more generalized sense of shape than
does "Ort," place, in its more immediate and unconstructed
experience.
"Ausmachen" I considered translating as "assign," to try to
keep the sense of both to construe and to determine.
"Assign"
keeps the poem's sign-imagery, of figuring out or deciphering.
It also suggests the sense of determining, whether as an
interpretive act or as planning, or charting a course.
But I
again chose to stay closer to Celan's own syntax and dictionlevel, to the more informal 'make out' which also means to figure
out, whether in space or in interpretation.
Nevertheless, I
could not find a way of also hinting at the sense of putting out,
as of a light, which "ausmachen" has in German.
In this way the
Wolosky 9
German text connects "ausmachen" with "Losch," extinguish.
"Go
out" for "Lo
"sch" at least keeps a rhythmic connection and
association with "make out" as this renders "ausmachen."
It also
attempts to carry forward the connection in these phrases to the
poem's ongoing image of ashes, as they go out.
As to "Miss," this is at once a word and a word-part.
In
these two guises, it resides at a border between the word group
in which it appears and those that are to follow.
"Miss" is an
inflection of "messen," measure, a term that will take on
increasing momentum as the poem proceeds.
But "Miss" is also a
prefix, a part of speech, suggesting lessening.
chosen "--less," to indicate the English suffix.
I have therefore
This suffix,
like "miss," involves measurement, but measurement as it
registers retraction, or erasure.
As a suffix, moreover, it acts
to change the meaning of the word-radical to which it is
attached, thus enacting that retraction, or erasure, which the
poem's language sequences themselves enact, as in Ort/Wort -- and
in the "Aschen-Helle" and "Vermessen" sequences that follow.
The poem's next line intensifies the ways in which
linguistic and historical experience become interlocking in the
poem, both as images for each other and as mutually implicating:
"Aschen-Helle, Aschen-Elle -- geschluckt."
As with Ort/Wort,
this line turns on the elision of a single letter through which
one word becomes another, as by reduction.
In my translation,
"Ash-bright" (Aschen-Helle) becomes "Ash-right" (Aschen-Elle).
Wolosky 10
What is swallowed, what is missing or less ("Miss") is the letter
itself, the "H," which makes "Helle" into "Elle," brightness into
ell: a unit of measure, a kind of yardstick, which I have tried
to render as "right"-- bright without the b.
But Celan's art is
to show how the words do not measure: they, in a distorted
sequence of terms of articulation, both in space and in language
(in the spaces of language), become inarticulate in their own
undoing.
"Vermessen" I translate as "Measured," picking up the
link with the earlier "Miss" both as measure and as a lessening,
which then follows (although the meaning of "vermessen" as
"presume" seems also brought into play in the German, almost as a
palimpsest meaning: what do we presume, that helps us make things
out?).
"Entmessen" becomes "dismeasured," to retain the
distorting neologism, in all its strangeness.
And "verortet,
entwortet" become "displaced, unworded" -- where, again, in the
German, the Ort radical (verortet) and the word radical
(entwortet) miss each other by the single letter: "W".
Again,
place and sense, world and word, are at once associated and
dissociated.
And this is performed as the letters are
themselves swallowed.
The letters themselves are missed -- a
movement further radicalized, and enacted, in "entwo" ; "dewo."
Celan performs his unwording.
In the German, but not the English
translation, this also rehearses the earlier, essential but
unanswerable question of fundamental placement and direction:
"Wo?"
Wolosky 11
In the poem's sequence, the erosion of light, with its power
for making out place, is figured also as an erosion of language,
and the power to decipher altogether.
These are no less erosions
of the self: a self as "Aschen-Schluckauf," swallowed as into the
ashes of history: or, also, hiccoughed: a disturbance of breath,
a suspension of time (one recalls Celan's collection called
"Atemwende," "Breathturning").
At this point, the historicist
aspect of the text cannot be evaded.
Ashes have for Celan an
inevitable residue of the Holocaust.
The poem's root image, of
the Eyes in Arms, may even suggest the tatooed numbers of the
camps.
The poem has, for all its linguistic mutabilities and
indeed through them, been profoundly historical.
In this text, the borders between history and theory -where theory is seen as investigation into the status of language
as such, in an autonomous sense -- are dissolved.
History is a
language- grid; and language is an historicist venture.
on many levels.
It is so
Language is itself marked by historical events,
which deform such words as "ashes" or even "arms" and "eyes."
But the very structure and status of language is in Celan
essentially temporalized: or rather, Celan's work insists on the
temporalized structure of language, making this central to his
project in ways that then implicate the work of others as well.
Language has a history; takes place in history; and is itself, in
its movements and course, its impetus and procedures, a
temporalized structure.
In "Deine Auge in Arms," this is enacted
Wolosky 12
not only through images, but through linguistic relationship and
progression.
Words in the text are at once severely dispersed
and carefully placed, strangely disrupted and yet intricately
related.
Its progress is erasure, and yet one that remembers,
records, traces that history which is itself one of disruption,
displacement, erasure.
The shape of the poem, its articulation,
emerges only out of, and within, these relationships within the
assaults and ruptures of history and temporality.
This historicity of language works in Celan against
recuperation: either as self-enclosed, autonomous aesthetic
object; or as the recovery of (German) language and literary
tradition; or as the reconstitution of experience into inclusive
and totalizing coherence.
In particular, Celan's poems resist
the attempt, perhaps temptation, to reincorporate Celan into a
German literature he, after all, persistently evokes, not only in
his echoes of earlier authors, but in his conjuring of the
sources of German language itself, as if in a Heidegerrean
project.
Nevertheless, the impulse to recuperation and
incorporation runs counter to Celan's textuality: to the status
of language and the very nature, and aims, of signification in
his writing.
As against such recuperation, Celan's can be called a
project of translation.
In Celan, there can be no total and
fixed reconstitution, whether between translation and text;
between Celan's text and German language and literature; between
Wolosky 13
Jewish and German histories; or between experience and its
possible meanings.
loss.
Yet the poem's motions are not merely ones of
That the patterns it traces are no less patterns of
erasure only reaffirms Celan's historicist commitment, not as
distinct from, but as specifically entailed in his language
project.
Yet, despite or within erasure, Celan's remains a
movement towards meaning, an effort to "make out," even if
(exactly as) inextricable from the erasures that "put out."
same project must inform its translation.
This
The traces of erasure,
of strain and strangeness, must be retained, both in the
translation and in its relationship towards the original.
To attempt to reconstitute his text into a fully integrated
linguistic form, one apparently self-sufficient and which brings
his figures to apparent closure, would be to ignore the
historicity which Celan shows to be no less theoretical.
The
very texture of language as an historical medium refute and
oppose those who claim Celan's linguistic structures to be selfenclosed, autonomous aesthetic objects.
As Celan himself
insisted: "Certainly it is never language as absolute, but rather
always in terms of the specific angle of inclination of the
existence of the speaking I, for its contours and its
orientation."viii
Walter Benjamin, in "The Task of the Translator" and other
theoretical discourses, projects a historicity of language
suggestive for Celan.
Language for Benjamin is radically
Wolosky 14
temporalized.
For any "individual, unsupplemented language,"
Benjamin insists that "meaning is never found in relative
independence, as in individual words or sentences; rather, it is
in a constant state of flux."
Translation itself takes part in
such historicity of meaning, "catching fire on the eternal life
of the works and the perpetual renewal of language."
Moreover,
Benjamin goes on to place this historicity in a metaphysics of
language.
Persistently using terms that are sacral and indeed
mystical, Benjamin refers translation also to an "end of[] time,"
in a "harmony of all the various modes of intention" which until
then "remains hidden in the languages (74)."
Just what Benjamin's own intentions are regarding both the
status and the relationship between the historical and the
sacral, remains a matter of argument.
Paul De Man, in his essay
on "Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator," argues that
Benjamin's notion of "Reine Sprache," pure speech, does not
constitute a unitary and recuperative realm, and remains
discontinuous with imminent languages.
De Man, however, points
this discontinuity towards nihilistic meaninglessness.
Resisting
what he calls Benjamin's "messianic, prophetic" tone as seeming
to propose "the figure of the poet as an almost sacred figure, as
a figure which echoes sacred language," De Man insists instead on
an essential opposition between the poetic and the sacred, as
also between the poetic and history, and indeed the poetic and
any reference or even any "extralinguistic meaning."
De Man's is
Wolosky 15
par excellence a theory which defines theory as necessarily
excluding everything except "relationship between language and
language," a "concern with language that issues necessarily into
a mise en abime of language as "bottomless depth" and as
"something essentially destructive."ix
In this, De Man merely
radicalizes anti-historicist theoretical presuppositions that can
be seen in other approaches to Celan, such as Peter Szondi's
interpretation of Celan's as a "conception of poetry in which the
poem is its own subject matter and both invokes and describes
itself as a symbol."x
But historicity need not oppose the sacral in Benjamin, and
certainly not in Celan.
Nor need linguistic self-consciousness
or relationship entail theory as either the denial of history or
the collapse of meaning.
In Celan (in ways that may illuminate
Benjamin as well), the course of language is conducted within
temporal boundaries, indeed through traumas, which Celan never
denies, never recuperates.
Neither does the historical either
merge with, or negate, the transcendent in Celan.
The text
remains non-recuperative in these senses as well.
But it
nevertheless intends.
It points, it is directional: in this
text, specifically as address.
Here, as fundamentally throughout
Celan's work, the poem is addressed to a "you," "Deine Augen im
Arm."
This "you" connects past with future, self with others.
But it also marks their separation, where each remains outside
and beyond the other.
What the exact status of such a beyond may
Wolosky 16
be, this poem leaves unspecified.
Yet, it is closely connected
with the poem's "Wo?," 'where,' which acts throughout as both
radical word-part ("entwortet," "dewo;" and as itself part of the
word: "Wort," word) and root question.
This is a question the poem does not answer.
poem continues to pose it.
Yet the
In doing so, it takes on direction,
but resolutely within its historicized structures.
This
direction is along a fragile edge, bordering at every point on
its own collapse.
The poem's movement is both birthgiving and
deathbringing: "the burnt-apart" is cradled further
(weiterwiegen).
It is a movement of both remembrance and
rupture, carrying memory forward, exactly across or through
transformation.
The poem itself moves in the image of the
"flying heartshadow," radically temporalized, painfully felt and
fleeting.
Thus, if it points beyond, it does so only from within
historicity and language.
The poem's motion points towards, but
not into this beyond, facing, but not possessing or claiming it.
The poem's final word, "immer," ever, remains finally historical,
if also situating.
In this, Celan's text traces that remoteness,
and that approach, which Benjamin ascribes to translation as
such, as "putting the hallowed growth of languages to the test:
How far removed is their hidden meaning from revelation, how
close can it be brought by the knowledge of this remoteness"
(74).
Wolosky 17
Notes
i. See Paul De Man, "Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the
Translator" in The Lesson of Paul De Man Yale French Studies No.
69 1985, 25-46, where De Man distinguishes between translating and
reading in Benjamin, p. 33.
ii. Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator" in Illuminations
trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt, (N.Y.: Schocken, 1969), 6982.
iii. This point is discussed by John Felstiner in various articles
and in his book Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995). Gerald Bruns similarly remarks that
Celan's is a "non-identical German, a German outside of German,"
but seems then to define this as "words leav[ing] behind the space
of their meanings," whereas in my argument, words leave nothing
behind and import their meanings back into the text.
"Introduction" to Gadamer on Celan, trans. and ed. Richard
Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski, (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1997), pp. 17-18.
iv. I have developed this point in "The Lyric and History:
Theorizing Paul Celan," forthcoming in Poetics Today.
v. Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke in fu
"nf Ba
"nden. 5 vols. (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), volume two, p. 123.
vi. Klaus Voswinckel, Verweigerte Poetisierung der Welt.
Heidelberg: Lothar Stiehm Verlag, 1974, p. 214
vii. "Auge der Zeit," from Von Schwelle zu Schwelle, Gesammelte
Werke vol. 1, p. 127. Cf. "Dunkles Aug im September"-- "Dark Eye
in September"-- opens: "Steinhaube Zeit," stonehood time
(Gesammelte Werke vol. 1, 26; also "Aufs Auge gepfropft," "Grafted
on Your Eye," vol. 1, 106, "Ein Auge, Offen," One Eye, Open," vol.
1, 187, etc.
Wolosky 18
viii.Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, p. 167.
ix. De Man, pp. 45, 34, 37.
x. Peter Szondi, "The Poetry of Constancy: Paul Celan's
Translation of Shakepeare's Sonnet 105," in On Textual
Understanding and Other Essays tr. Harvey Mendelsohn Theory and
History of Literature Vol. 15, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986), 161-178, p. 178. In his discussion of
translation and Celan, Szondi invokes Walter Benjamin's "intention
of language" as deployed and distinctive within each given
language act/ translation. Szondi, however, understands Celan's
intention to be a severe symbolist self-reference, a language
about language. He thus reinforces and intensifies the barrier
between theory and history. But Celan's intention of language is
exactly historical. I have discussed the question of history,
language, and the sacral in Paul Celan in Language Mysticism: The
Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett, and Celan (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1995).